David Helgason

Icelandic entrepreneur & climate investor. Partner @TransitionVC. Founder and former CEO of @Unity.

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@DadaJudith tl;dr version 🙈🪬

[Transition Ventures @TransitionVC]

We have raised over $150m to back the founders building what comes next.

The AI buildout and geopolitical pressures have made it undeniable that progress within planetary boundaries runs on atoms: energy, materials, infrastructure. The polluting, extractive, wasteful systems of the old world are giving way, and the companies rebuilding the physical world are scaling faster than ever.

@OLIXComputing is going after compute energy bottlenecks and just hit a $1bn valuation. @UpwayShop has put 200,000 refurbished e-bikes on the road, growing revenue 30x. @Seneca_Systems is fighting wildfires with autonomous drones, and raised a $60m first round.

The most ambitious founders want to build a company that matters, one that drives human progress for generations to come. They mold atoms, not just bits. Full-stack by necessity, principled by design, built to outlast them. The work is harder than traditional software, but the prize is exponentially bigger: reinventing the foundations of human prosperity.

We built Transition for these founders. Fund II lets us back more, from day one.

If you're building a legacy that matters, let’s chat!

@davidhelgason @arihelgason @clararicard1 @KristianBranaes @jamesdacombe @Stu_Land

[Gaurab Chakrabarti @Gaurab]

Half of America's AI data centers planned for 2026 are delayed or cancelled. They're waiting on transformers. I build chemical plants. Transformer prices have tripled in the last four years. Lead times are 2 to 4 years. Each new plant we build competes with AI data centers for the same grid equipment. Every large power transformer in America runs on grain-oriented electrical steel. It's made by rolling iron and silicon together until their crystals align in one direction. No other alloy works at utility scale and only one US company makes it: Cleveland-Cliffs. The average large power transformer on the grid is 38 years old. Service life is 40. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft committed $650 billion to AI infrastructure this year. Nvidia's most expensive GPU is useless without a transformer.

[Transition Ventures @TransitionVC]

We face an urgent shortage of reliable, high-density, base load power driven by electrification and the boom in demand for AI compute. Nuclear is one of the few clean, scalable options, but decades of complexity and regulatory friction have prevented meaningful deployment ⚡️

@Applied_Atomics solves this by developing and operating vertically integrated small modular nuclear plants, using proven light-water reactor technology to deliver clean electricity directly to hyperscalers and industrial sites.

Very excited for Transition Ventures to co-lead their latest $8.3m funding round and join Ben Kellie, Paul Keutelian and the Applied Atomics team on this journey!

cc @MorpheusVC @alpacavc @AcequiaCapital Unruly Capital

Read more on our Substack here: https://t.co/9k1ISPZSLk

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@IlvesToomas That’s an administration that’s run out of ideas. “Everyone get out and shake the train”

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@kevinhollinrake @PalantirTech Not a Brit here, but let me propose: the right course of action is to first rip the contracts up, and then go find out how the hell this happened.

We all need to get Palantir the 𝚽#§꩜¶ out of our data.

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@suni_code rsync library is excellent

[James Dacombe @jamesdacombe]

Today the Financial Times reported on OLIX's latest financing round. We've now raised just north of $250M to continue building the first Optical Tensor Processing Units (OTPUs), and deliver them to customers.

We're also publishing the OLIX Compute Manifesto: our view on what it will take to win in inference-era compute. Link in comments.

It is our belief that scaling an SRAM-architecture integrated with photonics can surpass HBM-based architectures on throughput/MW and TCO, and significantly outperform silicon-only SRAM-architectures in interactivity and latency.

We're scaling fast. If you want to work on the most important compute problem of the next decade, we're hiring across London, Austin, San Francisco, Toronto, and Bristol.

https://t.co/crouNrzYib

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@OLIXComputing @jamesdacombe Some thoughts: https://t.co/7jmpnQ7euR

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

Extremely proud of being part of the @OLIXComputing journey with @jamesdacombe.

Keep an eye out of this quiet kid... I am certain that James will turn out to be one of the greatest founders of this generation.

https://t.co/PbNodGEpof

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@JohnCleese “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@yoemsri @Polymarket Both can be true.

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@HarryStebbings @Kieranleehill At least it’s the same valuation 🧮

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@rabois @JohnDVillarreal @RadioFreeTom I don’t think so Keith, but it’s one opinion.

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@rabois @JohnDVillarreal @RadioFreeTom “Sure, after threatening your longest term partners with violence, we allow you to reopen your old bases and put a flag there…”

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

OH “War should really be called pre-traumatic stress disorder!”

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@konzeptzwei Because all the problems that the hostile takeover purports to solve are not there. The US already has as many bases as it wants (previously as many as 20, now just one). And minerals can be mined by anyone who’s willing to invest. Even Icelanders are mining there forchrissake!

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

So y’all think that this made up Greenland problem is just a great hill to go tear the rest of your goodwill up over???

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

Any European government currently letting Palantir access its constituencies data should be replaced promptly. This was always insane, now it's criminal.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is frankly a complete dereliction of duty. Not only have France's intelligence services been using an American company to analyze some of the country's most sensitive data for a decade, but - in the current context - they're insane enough to re-sign for another 3 years.

Try to square this circle:

- The Americans, in their National Security Strategy, openly say that one of their key strategic priorities is to "Cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations," i.e. foreign interference aimed at regime change

- Europeans are starting to recognize the problem, with Germany's Merz now essentially saying that the Americans are an adversary (https://t.co/ozaVy9Q28y), that they're "pursuing their interests very, very aggressively" and that Europeans can "only respond" by also doing so.

- Yet France's own intelligence services are handing some of their most sensitive data to an American company. And not in a small way: according to French media (https://t.co/C5KwPI8mUg) Palantir now constitutes the "central software architecture" of the DGSI. You couldn't make it up.

Even Israel, despite being joined at the hip with Washington, won't let Palantir near its core intelligence systems - Unit 8200 and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) rejected the system precisely because of sovereignty issues (https://t.co/mLLMs4LZ0L)

France, meanwhile, is like "sure, help yourselves and let's renew for another 3 years - we're confident you'll only use this data to protect us, not to 'cultivate resistance' to our government."

At some point it's so absurd and strategically incoherent that the Americans can save themselves the trouble of "cultivating resistance", this level of incompetence does the job all by itself.

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

@albertwenger Mad that it’s a surprise every time anyone speaks up 🦋